Experts hoping to find words on erased Nixon tape

181/2-minute gap is Watergate mystery

August 09, 2001|By James Warren, Washington Bureau.

WASHINGTON — For all those who have claimed they can solve a central mystery of the Watergate scandal, namely, what was in the 18 1/2-minute gap on a key tape of a conversation of President Richard Nixon, it is now time to put up or shut up.

That's because the National Archives on Wednesday took the latest step in an ongoing investigation into whether anybody can recover parts of a conversation taped between Nixon and top aide H.R. Haldeman shortly after the June 1972 break-in that led to the president's resignation Aug. 9, 1974.

The archives announced a challenge for sound experts and others who crave to try their handiwork on the actual tape, which is in fragile condition and has been played just six times since 1974, most recently in 1992 to create copies on digital audio tape.

The archives intend to not only test applicants' ability to recover intelligible sound, but also to measure their ability to preserve the tape in the process.

Those competing for a government contract to work on the Nixon tape first would try to safely recover conversation on a contemporary test tape erased by the archives.

The final challenge involves 6 1/2 hours of original but blank Nixon tape. The archives will record conversation on that blank tape, erase it and then ask the applicants to recover the lost conversation. The condition of the blank tape is akin to that containing the Nixon-Haldeman tape, which is stored at 65 degrees in a vault in College Park, Md.

The infamous gap, which is 18 minutes and 28 seconds long, is historically significant because it involved Nixon's first taped conversation on Watergate following the break-in at the Democratic Party's national headquarters at the Watergate complex.

Nixon was in Florida when the crime took place and for several days after. Many law-enforcement officials and historians have assumed that the tape was erased intentionally, though Nixon's loyal longtime secretary, Rose Mary Woods, said she did it by accident. She lives in Ohio and does not discuss the matter.

Historians know that the subject of the conversation was Watergate because of notes taken by Haldeman. After the tape was subpoenaed as part of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force's criminal investigation, the White House informed U.S. District Judge John Sirica about the gap.

Sirica, who oversaw the Watergate case, commissioned a panel of experts in 1974 to study the low-quality tape, which was initially purchased for Nixon's secret taping system by the Secret Service at a drug store near the White House. That panel determined the conversation could not be retrieved.

The original tape has had a tortuous preservation history, including sojourns in a closet at the Old Executive Office Building and in a Virginia warehouse, where it occasionally was subjected, accidentally, to temperatures of nearly 90 degrees.

The National Archives has solicited counsel from an advisory panel on preservation, including top sound experts from government and industry, ranging from the FBI to Hollywood. The consensus is that the odds are extremely long that anything of value can be discerned from the gap and that Sirica's panel was correct in throwing up its hands.

Still, there have been respected and dissenting voices. They are led by Steven St. Croix of Intelligence Devices Inc., a Baltimore company that performs speech extraction from recordings and whose clients have included the archives and a major Hollywood studio desirous of preserving old movies.

The Nixon-Haldeman conversation took place not in the Oval Office, as did many of Nixon's taped conversations, but in his office at the nearby Old Executive Office Building. The sound quality in the room was very poor, and listeners must strain to understand tapes of those chats.

St. Croix expressed confidence during an archives meeting last year that he could at least eliminate the background noises on the original tape. Yet that raises the question of whether there would be anything left to hear.

At the time, he conceded that if he did get to test the actual tape, perhaps he would wind up with little more than "a beautiful, distortion-free nothing."